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Wednesday, December 07, 2016

`A Morbid Obsession with the Future'

“Except
for a contemporary placard or two, the place conspired to set me dreaming of
the good old days I had never known.”

The
place is a tavern, almost certainly somewhere in the upper Midwest. It’s a
comfortable, unpretentious joint with a masculine patina. Conversation mingles
English and German. Men play cards and talk. Strangers are rare. No women are
present. Nothing fancy, no ferns or flat-screen televisions. The drink is beer.
On the menu is “bread, butter, and a dish of beets.” Present are six characters
and the narrator. For the latter, the “good old days” are suggested by “the
cloudy mirrors, the grandiose mahogany bar, the tables and chairs ornate with spools
and scrollwork . . . and swillish brown paintings, inevitable subjects, fat
tippling friars in cellars,” and so forth. It’s the sort of place where H.L.
Mencken and our grandfathers might have felt at home.

The
author is J.F. Powers. The sentence at the top opens “Renner” in his first
collection, Prince of Darkness and Other
Stories (1947). I’ve read Powers’ stories many times over the years. His
prose and surgical sense of irony bring him as close as an American writer has
ever gotten to Evelyn Waugh, while remaining his own man. What surprised me is
how inviting I found the setting of “Renner,” even though I no longer drink and
rarely step into a tavern. I felt as though I might have written those opening
words, including the final twist. Of late, I find myself peculiarly susceptible
to fits of nostalgia, even for times and places I have never known. Normally, succumbing
to nostalgia for me is repellent. Age-related soft-headedness is probably responsible,
as it is for other lapses. But much in the past is valuable and some of it we
have lost, whether through forgetting or willful, arrogant demolition. This
juggling of respect for the past and distrust of nostalgia is tartly described
by Sir Roger Scruton in On Hunting
(St. Augustine’s Press, 1998):

“Nostalgia
is an unhealthy state of mind. But the study, love and emulation of the past
are necessary to our self-understanding. All that has gone most wrong in our
century has proceeded from a morbid obsession with the future—a belief in `new dawns’,
`revolutionary transformations’, and resurrected nations on the march. The
past, unlike the future, can be known, understood and adapted to our current
uses. When we cast ourselves free from it, we are swept away by outside forces,
adrift on the oceanic tide of happening. The future, which we cannot describe,
begins to seem inevitable. This surrender to the unknown persists, despite all
the crime and destruction that have been wrought in its name.”